Mars B. Howard

Full Stack Software Engineer · Saint Louis, MO

Experience

Founder & Lead Engineer · Donada

Apr 2026 — Present
  • Built and maintain a Cardano-based NFT platform end to end — smart contracts, frontend, and infrastructure — as the sole engineer.
  • Designed a rental contract system letting NFT holders earn yield while renters and community wallets gain eligibility for scheduled, automatically-paid on-chain prize draws.
  • Shipped an on-demand NFT minting platform backed by an Aiken Plutus V3 minting policy with on-chain price enforcement.

Software Engineer in Test · Mastercard

Dec 2022 — Apr 2026
  • Designed and maintained Splunk and Dynatrace monitoring infrastructure to improve production visibility.
  • Developed and enhanced automated regression suites using Rest Assured, reducing manual testing effort.
  • Performed functional and integration testing in distributed systems environments.
  • Collaborated with engineering and operations teams to troubleshoot production incidents.
  • Contributed to CI/CD quality gates for release validation.

Network Operations Analyst · Mastercard

Nov 2021 — Dec 2022
  • Provided technical analysis and support to eighteen customer-impacting applications.
  • Retrieved database information via SQL and accessed remote servers via SSH and Unix commands.
  • Created automation processes utilizing Python and Selenium.

Vehicle Service Technician · Enterprise Holdings

Oct 2015 — Nov 2021
  • Analyzed an average of one hundred vehicles per week for damage, inoperative equipment, and safety hazards.
  • Communicated with partnering shops to move vehicles in and out of the database, raising customer service score to 90/100.

Education

Full Stack Developer Program · Flatiron School

Jan — Jun 2020

CS50x · Launch Code

2016

Computer Information Systems · Lincoln University

2009 — 2014

Skills

JavaScriptTypeScriptReactReduxRuby on RailsJavaPythonRest AssuredSeleniumPostmanInsomniaSplunkDynatracePostgreSQLSQLiteGitHerokuLinux/UnixSSH